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Six weeks then.
Six weeks Cobb had been trapped up in the high country, just waiting and waiting. Gleer, Barlow, and Noolan waited with him…though Barlow had suggested a heroic outbreak through the snows that had sealed off the pass and locked them tight at the foot of the summit. Nobody took him up on it.
At least not yet.
They weren’t desperate enough.
But it was coming, God yes, you could see it just as Cobb was seeing it now as he looked into those weathered, rutted faces burned by subzero winds and discolored by frostbite. You could see it there along with the bitterness and unease and animosity that was fermenting in them. For the past week it had been raging inside each of them, a potent and toxic brew bubbling up from the seething pit of each man. A brew that was sheer poison, seeping and simmering and smoking. It was fast becoming a palpable thing in the confines of the cedar-post cabin and its stink was raw and savage.
None of them had spoken in three days now.
They were reaching the point where their choices were being made for them. By nature. By God. By whatever cruel force had imprisoned them up in the mountains with no hope of deliverance. It was fed by hatred of Cobb, of course. For, although none of them had voiced it yet, they all blamed him for their predicament. He was the one that had insisted they stay into the winter, hunting that mine, and by the time January had sealed them up tight…there was nothing to do but wait.
Wait and go mad.
Yeah, they went through a stiff semblance of culture, but culture, like ethics and morals, died a long, hard death in those godless wastelands. Gleer still worked his traplines. Barlow went out hunting each morning with his Hawkens rifle. Cobb and Noolan still cut brush for the fire. But there was no food coming in and a warm fire and plenty of water didn’t fill their bellies.
They were slat-thin to a man, like skeletons covered in membranous flesh. Eyes jutting. Cheeks hollowed into cadaverous valleys. Teeth chattering and bony fingers wrestling in narrow laps. They had already eaten the horses. Even boiled the hooves for soup. Barlow had been nibbling on his belt and Gleer was chewing on a deerhide knife sheath.
So, if there was madness here, it was born of hunger.
Of solitude.
Of hopelessness.
No game was coming in and even the few rabbits Gleer had brought in last week were not enough to stave off the hunger pangs for more than a few hours. They needed meat. Real meat. Their bellies cried out for it, their teeth gnashed for it. Their tongues licked fissured lips, dreaming of venison steaks and beef shanks. Blood. Meat.
Of all of them, only Cobb took it in stride.
Something in him was enjoying the plight of the others. Was enjoying how they’d slowly become living skeletons, ghoulish figures that would’ve looked perfectly natural…or unnatural…wandering from the gates of a cemetery worrying at their own shrouds. As starvation progressed, social amenities failed one after the other. Their thoughts were of meat. Their dreams were of meat. In that high, wind-blasted netherworld of snow-capped peaks, shrieking winds, and whipping blizzards, there was only one way to get meat.
One last, unthinkable way.
Cobb was waiting for it. He already saw it in the dead pools of their eyes. The way they looked at each other and at him. Survival had canceled out any bond they’d once shared. To a man they knew one thing in their fevered, deranged minds…only one of them could come out of this in the spring.
And the hunger was upon them. The taboo lust for flesh of one’s own kind. And in the close, confined atmosphere of the cabin, you could smell it…a heavy, sour, vile odor tainting the very air.
And maybe it was starvation that was bringing it on, forcing them into damnable regions of thought, and maybe it was something else.
Maybe it was what they found in the cave.
Or what found them.
It was Barlow who located it.
He had been out hunting with Noolan. They both stumbled back to the cabin, winded and worn, with something like fear in their eyes. They stood in the doorway babbling, framed by a field of white and blowing death, rifles in fur-mittened hands, snowshoes on their feet.
“ What?” Cobb had put to them. “What in the name of Christ is it? What did ye find?”
And maybe part of him was thinking, hoping, they’d found the mine…but he didn’t really believe it. For what he saw in their eyes plainly told him it was not good. If a regiment of injun ghosts had descended upon them, they could not have looked more grave.
“ You better come,” Noolan said. “You just better come.”
So, wrapped in buffalo coats and bearskin hats, swaddled up like babies in all their gear, they fought through the drifts and winds that tried to knock them off the narrow trails along the jagged cliffs. The world was white and whipping and immense. The sky seemed to reach down and become mountain and it was hard to say where one began and the other ended.
Noolan led them to a little cave mouth set into the base of a limestone bluff with craggy walls and a jutting overhang which looked as though it might fall and crush them at any moment.
Cobb could see the snowshoe prints leading away. Looked like they’d been in one hell of a hurry to get some distance between themselves and the cave mouth.
“ All right, goddammit,” Cobb said, his breath frosting in clouds. “What is it? Goddamn mother lode or the Devil his ownself?”
“ You better just go in,” Barlow said, secretive as a schoolboy.
Cobb went in first, with Gleer at his heels. Both of them were grunting and puffing as they wedged their way in flat on their bellies. The shaft was barely big enough for a man to snake his way through. With the heavy furs and leggings, it took some time to corkscrew themselves into the central chamber. Like forcing a wadded-up rag through the neck of a wine bottle.
Inside it was black as original sin.
Cobb called out to Gleer and his voiced echoed eerily into unknown heights. Gleer had the oil lantern. He struck a match off the cave wall and touched it to the wick, adjusting the flame. The cavern was big enough to shelter two freight wagons side by side. It continued on up a gentle, pebble-littered slope into another darkened chamber. Cobb looked around, seeing lots of granite and gravel, great masses of bedrock that had fallen from the roof in years long past. He saw nothing else noteworthy.
Yet… yet, there was something here. Something unusual. He could feel it same way a man can feel his own skin or the balls dangling between his legs. There was something here. Something important. Something secret.
Gleer held out the lantern at arm’s length, wild lurching shadows darting about them. Rising and falling, swimming and diving and leaping. He licked his lips. Licked them again. It was warmer inside and ice began to melt on his beard, water dripping onto his shaggy coat.
“ What the hell did they find in here?” he wanted to know. “Ain’t shit but dirt and rocks. Ain’t shit else.”
But there was and they both knew it, felt it, but did not dare let their lips frame it into words. Instead, they stood side by side, waiting and wondering and maybe even worrying. Way a man will when he knows something is circling his campfire. Something big. Something awful. Something with teeth and attitude.
Cobb did not feel afraid.
He told himself in many a situation that as far as fear went, he inspired it, he did not experience it. And maybe that was true and maybe it was bullshit, but, at that moment, he was not afraid. For a voice in his head was telling him that yes, yes, this is what he had come to find. Somewhere in this cave and it passages was sheer revelation.
“ Ain’t nothing here,” Gleer said, his voice dry. “So let’s just-”
“ There’s something here, all right.” Cobb looked over at Gleer, motes of dust drifting around him like moths. “Cain’t ye smell it?”
“ Yeah…yeah, I guess I can.”
Cobb was likening it to decay. Sweet, gassy decay like a bin filled with rotten potatoes or a flyblown corpse washed-up on a riverbed. A moist, rank smell which simply did not belong in this dry, hollow place where even the air was grainy and tasted of dust.
A muscle was jumping in Gleer’s throat. “Don’t like it none. Let’s make to getting the hell out.”
“ Follow me,” was all Cobb said.
He followed the stink like a tasty aroma, led it pull him into the kitchen of this place where the goods were simmering and steaming. He moved up the slope, stepping carefully around razorbacked outcroppings and over flat tumbled stones. Together they moved up into the passage which was tight and twisting, the ceiling brushing their fur caps. And in the next chamber, they found-
They found bones.
Maybe some animal bones, but mostly human.
A great central pit had been carved out of the floor, hacked out as if with picks and shovels to a depth of maybe ten or fifteen feet and it was filled with bones. An ossuary. A charnel pit of ulnas and femurs, vertebrae and ribcages. And skulls…Jesus, what seemed to be hundreds of skulls. Adults and children. And the only thing all those bones had in common was that they were charred…as if they had been roasted. Blackened skulls stared up at them, alluding to ghoulish secrets they would not tell.
A scapula shifted and it caused a minor rain of arm and leg bones. A skull tumbled from its perch and grinned at them, its lower jaw missing.
“ Moved,” Gleer said, his face lined with tension. “Something in there…Mary, Mother of God, something in there moved…”
He had his Colt pistols out and he wanted very badly to empty them into something, anything. Because he was a man who handled the unknown with knife and gun, hatchet and bow. And what was eating into him then could not be found nor defined quite so easily.
“ Dead,” Cobb told him. “All long dead. Just settling is all. If they was just rocks and one fell, ye wouldn’t come out of yer skin, would ye?”
Gleer calmed, shook his head. “Suppose not.”
“ Well, them bones cain’t hurt ye no more than rocks can.”
But what he wanted to say was that he had a weird, unearthly feeling that whatever was in the cave, whatever was hiding and whispering around them, just might have caused those bones to shift. Just like it might cause more trouble. And maybe, hell, maybe it would make them bones stand right up and walk about.
Cobb and Gleer moved around the chamber and came to another just off the first.
And it was the same. Bones. More and more bones. Whoever had owned them had been long dead. There were what looked to be ancient, rusted ringbolts pounded into the high, flat table rock above. From them…ancient lengths of hemp rope hanging like dead snakes. From a few of them were brown, mummified hands. As if, people had been hung there and left, allowed to putrefy and drop, only their hands left to mark the grim occasion.
Cobb touched one of the ropes…it began to flake away in his fingers.
“ This place,” Gleer said, his eyes fixed with an almost religious ecstasy, “it’s goddamn old. I mean really old, Jimmy-boy. Lookit at all, will you? This place…ha, ha…I think it was chopped right out of the mountain. People…injuns…worked it like we would a mine shaft.”
Cobb studied the rough-hewn walls. You could see they’d been chiseled, hacked from solid rock. None of it, save the original cavern was natural. The tool work on the walls was all-too apparent.
Gleer was making a funny sound in his throat that was somewhere between gagging and laughter. He played the light around some more. There were pictures on those walls. Primitive paintings, etchings. Mostly run-of-the-mill stuff like bear and mountain lion and bison. Things Cobb had seen splashed or carved into many cave walls and rock faces in the Southwest. Even up north in the Montana and Dakota Territories. Herds of animals. Stick figures hunting them. Dancing. Sitting around fires. Just your basic depictions of tribal life.
But Gleer, whose mama was half-Chickasaw, seemed fascinated by them. He studied them, making those gulping/giggling sounds in his throat, whispering things beneath his breath.
“ See? See?” he said. “See how down low here, down here you got your oldest images. Most of these are faded, worn by time…shit, hundreds and hundreds of years old if not more. Maybe thousands.” He was breathing hard now, licking his lips. He followed the paintings and cuttings up the wall with the lantern. “You get up here, Jimmy Lee, you get up here and, sure, you can make ‘em out better. These ain’t as old, eh? But still old, old, very old.”
Cobb still was not impressed. Just injun-art. What of it?
But Gleer wouldn’t let it go.
He explained in some detail what it all meant, what the rock was saying to them, how it reached out across the centuries telling them a tale of life long gone from these hills. Hunting. Fishing. Battling enemies. Birth. Death. Religious ceremony. Marriages. Funerals. If you could read it and it wasn’t too hard, Gleer said, it was just like a book.
“ Looks like a village there,” Cobb said, indicating a cluster of lodges. “Wonder what the hell happened to it?”
“ Probably down there in that valley, what’s left of it,” Gleer said. “Covered in snow.” He followed the art across the wall. “See? See this?”
Cobb saw it. Was so impressed he stuck a cigar in his mouth and smoked it, knowing there was more here than just silly injun-art.
“ They…they were working this mountain, maybe these caves, tunneling…”
Cobb could see it fine. Stick figures at work. Using what might have been primitive shovels and picks, staffs and baskets to haul out rock. Looked like drawings of ants working their hive. Figures everywhere.
Gleer was getting real excited now. “Right here…Jimmy, right goddamn here, something happened,” he said, stabbing the wall with a dirty index finger.
“ What?”
Gleer told him it was big, bad medicine, whatever it was. All the symbols and hex signs attested to that. To Cobb it looked as if down in their tunnels they had dug into another chamber. The chamber was represented by a jagged gouge…and out of it, something like smoke misting out.
“ A catastrophe,” Gleer said. “See? All them figures are laying about now. All dead.”
“ Gas probably. Hit a pocket of poison gas.”
“ No…no, I think it’s worse than that.” He was panting now, rubbing grime and settled dust from the walls, close to something, but he wasn’t sure what. “There…not gas…something else…something they dug out of the ground, something real bad…”
Cobb was studying it pretty close himself now.
Another representation of that jagged chasm, more smoke or mist seeping up and out. Only the mist was now shown to have gathered above the dead and the living like some storm cloud. A storm cloud made of skulls and devil-faces. The drawings went on and that cloud appeared to have come up out of the cave and settled over the village.
“ It got to ‘em,” Gleer said, his eyes wide and the lantern trembling in his fist now. He looked afraid. His face was tight and set with wrinkles and taut cords. “It got to ‘em, Jimmy? Don’t you get it? Don’t you?”
The paintings abruptly ended there and there were no more.
Cobb didn’t really get it. Something was crawling in his belly like worms and it made him feel giddy. The birthmark on his back was throbbing. Something was happening to him, but he didn’t see. Not really. Not just yet. The Indians had been mining or something. They had cut deep into the mountain and uncovered a hidden chamber, dug into it…and something, something had come out. Something that killed a lot of ‘em. Something real bad came out of the ground.
Gleer was half out of his mind now.
He was running around, handling bones and skulls, waving femurs and tibias about. He set the lantern at the edge of the pit and dove into all those bones like some insane swimmer into a charnel sea. He paddled and sorted, handled and searched. His fingers traced the craniums of skulls, poked into orbits, tapped at yellowed teeth set in pitted jaws. He stroked the rungs of a ribcage, eyed a blackened pelvic wing like maybe it was his own.
“ Get the hell out of there,” Cobb told him and meant it. “Yer losing yer mind, damn ye!”
Gleer climbed out, the bones falling away from him with a sound like tumbling kindling. Cobb grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pitched him to the floor.
“ I ain’t mad, Jimmy! It’s just…hell, it’s just that I know! I know!” He was cackling now, drool running from the corners of his lips. His entire body was shuddering. “These bones…lookit ‘em, will ya? Look close.”
Cobb did.
And then he got it…or some of it. The bones? all the bones in fact? were riddled with tiny cuts and gashes and nicks. Somebody had been hacking and cutting on their owners. And maybe worse…because he found what looked to be teeth marks set into them.
“ Cannibals,” Cobb said in a low voice. “Just like in them Pacific islands I read about when I was a kid. Man-eaters…”
“ That’s right, yes sir, that’s right.” Gleer was still laughing, but tears had welled in his eyes now. “But they didn’t do it on their own, Jimmy Lee, no sir! What they cut out of the ground…whatever it was…it turned ‘em that way, took hold of their savage heathen minds and turned them into monsters…”
Cobb took hold of him and got him out of those caverns. Gleer was stark raving by that point. And maybe it was just Cobb’s imagination, but that high, hot gassy smell seemed almost stronger. Rancid, even.
As if whatever was dead in there, had begun to decay once again after many long years.
Cobb got Gleer outside and with the help of the other two, they wrestled him back to the cabin. But he was in a bad way. They had to shackle him to the wall with chains snapped from beaver traps and nailed into the logs themselves. He was talking crazy, shaking and gibbering, hearing things scratching around outside that none of the others could. Talking with people that weren’t there. Going native like his mother’s people and asking for protection from the Great Spirit. So they left him shackled for a week like that, pissing himself, drooling and screeching.
“ Think I’m crazy, don’t you? Think I’ve lost what mind I did have, don’t you?” he rambled on incessantly one afternoon as the wind made the cabin shake. “But I ain’t nohow crazy. Because I know what was up there…I could smell it there and I can smell it here now. Maybe you, Cobb, or you, Barlow…maybe you don’t know what I’m taking about. But Noolan…I don’t know about you. It might have touched you the way it touched them injuns. Ain’t saying it did…but it got to one of us, ‘cause I can smell it! Hear? I can smell it. One of you, yes sir, you know what I’m talking about on account you’re just waiting for the lights to dim so you can feed on the others. I know it! I know it! Oh…ho, ho, my God, my dear Lord Jesus, them injuns, them injuns. Roasting babies and sucking brains from skulls and chewing on the flesh of their young…eating, eating. Offering up their daughters to that, that thing come straight out of hell…”
“ Shut the fuck up!” Barlow snapped finally. “You shut up with that talk or I’ll kill you! I swear to God I’ll kill you!”
Gleer was getting to everyone by that point. Maybe even Cobb. But you couldn’t tell it from that cool smirk on his face. Noolan calmed Barlow down and took him outside for some fresh air being that it was the one thing they had plenty of.
When they were gone, it was just Cobb and Gleer in the cabin. The logs popped and shifted in the hearth. The air was smoky and thick. It stank of body odor and charred logs. What it didn’t stink of these days was food.
“ Ye’ve got to get a hold of yerself, Gleer,” Cobb told him. “Ye carry on like this…well, one of them boys is gonna shoot ye dead.”
Gleer just played with his chains, running the loops through his fingers. He nodded. “I know, I know…but I’m scared, Jimmy Lee. I’m damn scared. I’m thinking…thinking that one of us just ain’t what he appears to be. That something got in him…inside him…and that man, he’s a monster now…”
Cobb considered it a moment and shrugged. “Maybe ye right,” he said. “Maybe you and me, maybe we better had keep an eye on them other two.”
Eventually, Gleer came back to his senses.
Barlow managed to shoot a couple wolves. They were rawboned things with hardly any meat on them, but it was something in their bellies. And Noolan made a hearty soup from the blood and fat. It didn’t taste all that wonderful, but it stuck to the bones. With some meat and soup in him at last, Gleer came to his senses.
They cut him loose.
But they kept an eye on him.
In fact, everyone kept an eye on each other. It was like everyone was afraid to be alone with anyone else. All four of them went about their daily routines with knives and pistols hanging from their belts. And when one came upon another out in the woods or poking through the ice that covered the stream…well, it was only sensible to give advance warning. For up there in that awful place, only the guilty sneaked around or moved silently.
Things got bad in the week following Gleer’s release.
The wind shook and rattled the cabin continually. It picked up sheets of snow and flung them all and everywhere. Visibility outside was down to eight, ten feet at any given time. The air was unnaturally cold. Sometimes the wind carried funny sounds with it, sounds like weeping or screaming. The voices of children chanting in some distant place. There were odd noises in the dead of night…noises like something walking up on the roof or scratching at the shuttered windows. A pounding at the outside walls. Weird distorted tracks found in the snow outside. Tracks that started suddenly and ended just as abruptly…like something had leaped down from the cold stars above and then leaped back up there again.
Noolan and Barlow could be heard whispering prayers at night.
Gleer just hid beneath his elk hides silently.
And Cobb, he just grinned, head always cocked like he was listening for something.
Because he had secrets from the others.
They didn’t know about him slipping off that night they’d found the cave. About him crawling in there in the frigid, dark hours. Walking amongst the bones with a lantern in hand. They didn’t know how it was for him when the gassy, fetid odor rose up from the trembling marrow of the mountain and fell over him like a shivering, stinking blanket. Or how it held him and made communion with something already hiding deep within him. Something planted there like an obscene seed in the blighted soil of his soul by his father. How it reached out and found this sleeping other and became one with it.
Because Gleer was right-there was a monster among them.
And it was getting hungry.
It had been three weeks since they found the cave now.
Two weeks since the last of the soup and wolf meat was eaten. Their bellies had been stark empty since and something in each and every man was decaying at an unpleasant rate.
Except for Cobb.
What was in him had already rotted to carrion.
Cobb was alone in the cabin…or nearly.
Noolan and Barlow had run off hours ago. Run off when they’d returned early from their hunt and found Cobb dressing out Gleer’s corpse, happily sorting through meat and muscle, selecting the finest cuts for steaks and the poorer ones for stews.
“ Hungry, gents?” he’d said, gore dripping from his mouth because, well, dammit, it was hard to do that sort of work without a little taste here or there. “Pull yerselves up a seat and see what old Jimmy Lee can do when the proper victuals is available.”
Barlow and Noolan just stood there, rifles in hand, mouths sprung like spittoons, staring and staring. One of them-Cobb couldn’t be sure which-let out a wailing scream and together they’d run off into the snows. Damn fools left the door open, too. Born in a goddamned barn, the both of ‘em.
That had been three, four hours before.
But Cobb knew they’d be back. Unless they decided to winter it out up in the cave; but they wouldn’t like that very much. It was one thing to be up there with light and heat…but when the lantern died out and the blackness swam up like some ravenous shark from a primeval, godless sea like it had for him, well that was an entirely different kettle of fish, mind you.
Cobb had long-since finished slaughtering Gleer.
When Cobb had pulled his Arkansas toothpick and walked up to him, speaking in the voices of long-dead injuns, Gleer had just gone to jelly. Slicker than shit, Cobb had slit his throat ear to ear and Gleer just accepted it. Now, there wasn’t nothing but a pile of bloody bones to mark his passing. His skin was drying on a rack before the fire, smartly salted for leather. His organs were gently layered in a black pot of brine, seasoning up for a fine stew that would last Cobb for weeks and weeks. The meat had been carved from his buttocks, belly, and breast and packed in snow so it would keep fresh and sweet. His blood had been drained off into buckets for soup and broth. Even his fat was saved. His ligaments and sinew were drying for catgut. And right that moment as Cobb listened to the wind speaking and cackling in the chimney pipe, he was grinding up muscle and organ to be stuffed into bowel casings for sausage.
Gleer’s head was sitting across from him.
The eyes were blanched and the tongue protruded blackly from those seamed lips. His bearskin cap was still on his head. A few greasy strands of hair had fallen over the sallow, blood-spattered face.
If Cobb concentrated real hard, he could even make it speak.
When he was done stuffing his sausages, whistling some old Indian deathsong he’d never once heard in his life, he nibbled on a little finger food he’d boiled from the bones below. One of Gleer’s legs was spitted and roasting over the fire, carefully seasoned. It was getting nice and brown, gobs of fat dropping from it and sizzling in the flames beneath. The meaty, rich smell filled the cabin and went up the flue.
Cobb knew the meat-smell would bring the others home.
They wouldn’t have a choice.
And he would welcome them, surely. He figured two more kills and he’d have more than enough meat to put up until spring, if he practiced a little conservation, that was. Avoided his usual gluttony. But he was no savage. He would invite both Barlow and Noonlan to break bread at his table. He’d give ‘em both a good meal before putting them to the knife.
It was the Christian thing to do.
So Cobb nibbled and waited, a curious light flickering in his eyes.
He remembered the night he’d crept back up to the cave, something in him telling him it was the right thing to do. That what was in there, what was hiding in the cracks and crevices and maybe the bones, too, was the very reason he had come. Not gold. But… it. Whatever in the hell it was. The very thing them injuns had cut from the ground. He could remember it started with that gassy smell. A foul, yellow odor it was, a terrible sweet smell of unburied corpses and miasmic tombs.
It had touched him.
Physically touched him.
In his head? as it held him tightly, nursed him against its breast like an infant? it had told him what to do. How long it had waited for him. How it was he could survive if he could simply overcome certain social taboos, that was.
But Cobb would not listen, would not.
He’d been thinking along those lines, but he wasn’t ready just yet.
And the thing had pressed him into itself, squeezed him so that he thought his bones would come busting out of his mouth. It told him there was no other way. If he wanted power…and he did want that, didn’t he? Then there was only one way to have mastery over men. Same way you had mastery over animals? by eating them. Devouring the flesh and absorbing all that they were and could be.
This, it said, was the path to invincibility and immortality.
But Cobb just was not sure, so the thing sweetened it a bit for him. It talked to him like an old friend. It didn’t try to intimidate or terrify him, it just talked in a natural, easy rhythm. And, funny thing, it had a deep Southern accent, a hellbilly accent just like his kin from the Missouri Ozarks.
Well, at least it seemed that way…but maybe it was just a breathing gray sibilance forming words in his head.
Now, let me tell ye something, Jimmy Lee. Jus’ mind me and listen, hear? Shet up now, this here’s important. Once upon a time, there was these injuns what lived up here in these hills. Just yer ordinary savages, I reckon. They was some shirttail kin of the Shoshoni called themselves the Macabro. Well, cousin, these Macabros, they started tunnelin’ in the earth like worms into pork…well, sir, weren’t long before they dug somethin’ up, somethin’ mebbe they weren’t a-supposed to find at all. It jumped up, said hello and how you be, and rode down hard on them savages like Christ come to preach. Now this thing here, it crawled into their skins. Ran roughshod all over the tribe like Yankees marching through Georgia. I shit you not. Ye remember them bad things what were supposed to live down in them hollers back home in Missourah? Yessum. This thing, it was like that. Now, it weren’t exactly neighborly, this critter. It got into them injuns deep. Sure as Christ was hammered to the cross, the Macabro belonged to this thing.
Now, cousin, lemme tell ye how it were fer them.
These injuns, they took to etin’ human flesh and what not, sacrificin’ their firstborn and all. The shaman would et the little shitters raw and wrigglin’. Yep, their own children, that’s what I said. But adults, too. Jus’ about anyone. And virgins…heh, that sumbitch what out of the ground, he was real sweet on maidens, see. Now, the Macabro were always fighting one tribe or another. When they caught some, they’d make burnt offerings of their enemies, nail ‘em upside down to poles and sometimes put ‘em to the flame and sometimes jus’ left ‘em there to rot to bone.
Now wait, son, keep yer Henry in yer pants…yep, there’s more. See, these Macabro…they started digging up their dead and the dead of anyone they could find, yessum. Started worshipping bones and skulls. Made altars of ‘em and doin’ things with the dead uns ye just don’t want to think about. They was jus’ real soft in the heads, this bunch.
Now these shaman, priests? whichever ye want to call them baby-rapin’ devils? they was quite a bunch. They called all the shots. Sumbitches didn’t cotton to bathin’ no how. A filthy lot what jumped and hopped about in their cloaks of baby-skins, snakes just a-twisting in their long filthy hair. They sang them profane songs and wore skull masks and chattered their teeth what were filed to points to rend and tear, ye see. These shaman, they controlled everything. Their bodies were tattooed with snakes and symbols and witch-sign, what they called the Skin-Medicine. Some sort of conjurin’ and magical formula written right on their skins. It was said that with this Skin-Medicine, them heathen devils could control the spirits of the dead and change themselves into man-eating beasts jus’ any old time the need struck ‘em. Now on nights of the full moon, the Macabro priests would light big fires and them injuns would dance naked in the snow while the priests read from their own skins. Injuns what had been captured from other tribes would be slaughtered, their flesh eaten, and the snow would just stain red with their blood. And if the Macabro could get some of those injun’s young-uns, well, a regular party they’d have chompin’ up that fine, fat squib.
Well, cousin, ye get the picture.
These injuns was mad, yessum, but they had it half-right about etin’ other peoples to absorb all they had. Now the Macabro, they was all wiped out by the Ute two-hundred year ago, but what ye found in the cave, yes sir, that was their legacy. See, the Ute herded them Macabros what weren’t killed outright and all the dead uns up into that cave, burnt ‘em up alive, seeded their bones in them pits. Yessum, the cave. It was fitting, I reckon, in that the cave is where a lot of that pagan sacrificin’ went on.
And now, Jimmy-boy, ye understand? Do ye? Do ye?
Cobb didn’t remember much after that.
Just that he wasn’t quite the same. Sometimes he was himself and sometimes part of the thing that had impregnated his mother and sometimes part of that rabid hillbilly out of the cave. Sometimes they were all just one mind. The next day and all the days after, Cobb just waited and plotted the getting of skin and meat and bone.
And that’s how it all came about.
Cobb, a chunk of finger meat packed in his cheek, went over and turned Gleer’s leg on the spit. He poked it with a fork and the juice ran free and clear, telling him it was done. His belly was rumbling at the nauseating stench.
Just then, he heard movement outside the cabin.
He grinned, his eyes flashing with hellfire. It was Barlow and Noolan being real quiet and stealthy, sneaking about like red savages. They were doing a good job of it, too, but Cobb heard them. The sound of their boots breaking the crust of snow. The roar of the blood in their veins, the throb of their hearts. And mostly, yes mostly, he could smell their fear and to him it was like freshly uncorked brandy.
Cobb went about setting the table.
His back to the door, they came bursting in, the both of them. They held pistols on him and they were both shaking from the cold, their faces pinched and mottled and edged with fear.
“ You’re crazy, Cobb, you sick sonofabitch,” Barlow said. “Now real careful like, I want you to take that pistol out of your belt…with your left hand. Real slow now, let it drop to the floor…”
But Cobb just giggled. “Ye stop with that talk, friend. I’m just a-setting the table here. I want the both of you to sit with me and have a fine meal. Ye know ye want to, so why fight it? We’ll have us some eats and discuss this like men.”
Barlow and Noolan just stood there, not sure what to do. Cobb was insane, sure, but why was he so damn calm? What was that funny light reflected in his eyes? There was something very wrong about all this and it wasn’t just the cannibalism either.
“ We better just shoot him,” Noolan said.
“ That wouldn’t be very neighborly, cousin,” Cobb said.
“ See? See? He’s crazy! Watch him now, watch him real careful, because James Lee Cobb he’s right fast with that Colt,” Noolan was saying. “He can pull it so fast you-”
“ Drop that gun on the floor,” Barlow said.
Cobb sighed, shrugged, went for the gun with his right hand. And actually cleared leather before two bullets ripped through his belly. But all that did was make him laugh as his blood dripped to the floor. He dipped one finger into the hole in his buckskin shirt like a quill into an inkwell. He pulled it back out, licked the tip. His face was narrow and pallid, real tight like a skull wearing skin, his eyes lit like glowworms.
But he had his Colt out and, barking a short laugh, put a slug right between Barlow’s eyes, dropping him dead in the doorway.
“ Now,” he said to Noolan. “Why don’t ye join me for supper? What’s say?”
The pistol dropped from Noolan’s fingers and he started to whimper. Whatever was in Cobb’s eyes had him tight. He stumbled over to the table, his own eyes wide and unblinking and filled with tears. He sat down and watched dumbly as Cobb pulled the leg off the spit and began to carve it up.
Then he began to eat.
His fork jabbing and his teeth chewing and his throat swallowing, his mind gone to a formless putty. He ate and ate while Cobb watched him, all the while holding Gleer’s head by the hair. And the real bad thing was that Gleer was speaking, that white furrowed face was speaking. The eyes were rolling in his head and that black tongue was licking his lips. Cobb asked him questions and he answered in a dry, whistling voice, telling Gleer exactly what it was like down in that black pit of death and how Noolan’s kin were all down there burning with him.
Sometime later, Gleer’s head screaming and the cabin filled with chanting injun voices, Cobb slit Noolan’s throat and dressed him out.
In the Spring, Cobb came down from the mountains on foot, his parfleche still packed with dried human jerky. His travels after that were unknown for the most part. What is known is that he assembled a crew of blooded killers with similar leanings and tastes as his own. That they accompanied him back to Missouri where there was something he needed to collect. And sometime later he made for the Shoshoni peoples. Knowing he had something in common with them now.
And somewhere along the way, he heard about a Snake medicine man called Spirit Moon.
Part Four:
The Good, the Damned, and the Deranged